REVIEWED BY: Dan Knauft
November 1996
For centuries, logical and sequential thinking has been viewed as the sine qua non of scientific inquiry. A theory was postulated and through rigid experimentation -- often consisting of numerous sequential steps -- attempts were made to either confirm or reject a hypothesis. In his book After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence James Bailey writes that we've thought this way throughout history because we've lacked the necessary tools to truly understand the complexities of life. He argues that we need to look at our existence as more than a linear progression of sequential patterns but rather as a series of highly elaborate, interactive, and parallel activities. He contends that the increased power of computers, particularly in the area of parallel processing, gives new insight into how we should view human behavior and ultimately how we should perceive of thought itself.
Bailey, a former executive at Thinking Machines Corporation has written a book that is unusual in the breadth that it takes about its subject material while skillfully presenting a historical overview of the fundamental precepts concerning the ways in which we think. The author covers topics ranging from Aristotle and Plato to artificial intelligence and parallel processing. To his credit, he has a written a book that can be understood and appreciated by the general public, yet savored by a college physicist.
Ironically, while close to half of the book serves as a critique of the historical emphasis on linear thought, the strength of After Thought lies in Bailey's historical (sequential) overview of humankind's attempt to understand "The Book of Nature" over the centuries. He presents the scientific world as having gone through two eras already, labeling them metaphorically as parts of this Book. He describes the first era as focusing on questions of place, the second era on questions of pace, while our current era focuses on questions of pattern.
The author gives a broad overview of the attempts by the earliest scientists to comprehend the world by focusing on a sense of place. God had created the world and our understanding of the scheme of things was defined by our awareness of where we were physically located in the universe. The author cogently describes the early astronomical attempts to understand the galaxy by such eminent scholars as Aristotle, Plato, and Galileo. The original philosophers and scientists tried to grasp a better knowledge of our existence through the use of lines and circles. Bailey describes how these early, albeit elaborate, graphical techniques were replaced -- with the invention of the printing press -- by the mathematical equations of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Rene Descartes. Scholars who argued that logic and mathematics should, and could, explain the universe.
The author identifies the second part of the Book of Nature as focusing on matters of pace rather than place. The world moved from one era to the other because scientists began asking fundamental questions and they were able to confirm or refute historical postulates through the use of advancing technologies. The period was introduced with the dawning of the Industrial Age. Physics replaced the use of numbers and equations. Bailey discusses the impact on this era by Charles Babbage's computational machine, both World Wars, the history of flight, Lewis Fry Richardson's mathematical equations as a way to predict the arms race, and the creation of electronic circuits.
Bailey writes that we are currently in the final period where scientific questions focus on patterns. Current technology allows us to view data as a complex system. We are living in a decentralized world where objects learn independently and cooperatively at the same time. The life sciences have taken over as the subject of choice. Chaos theory and the inter-relationship of objects has replaced Principia Mathematica and the orderly flow of things. The author argues that our past understanding of the world was limited by our ability to develop tools that could confirm or deny prevalent theories. We viewed the world in sequential terms because we couldn't think in parallel. Our minds could only think through one step at a time, because that's how we had been taught to understand the world. He contends that we need to start viewing life in more complex terms.
Bailey presents anecdotal examples of our failure to see the importance of parallel processing and complex systems. One illustration that he recounts is the early attempts at weather forecasting. Scientists utilized old weather maps that looked like that particular day's weather conditions rather than trying to predict conditions based on an examination of numerous factors.
In the last few chapters, the seminal work of developers in artificial intelligence is called upon and overviews of particular research projects are presented. Bailey discusses the work of one researcher, Mitchel Resnick, who has developed a MacIntosh computer application called StarLogo. It illustrates how the creation of a few simple rules can impact a much larger society and the program allows students to develop a primitive neural network.
After Thought is a provocative and ambitious book. It's an ideal publication for any class that is studying artificial intelligence, artificial life, neural networks, or any of the other "cutting edge" research areas of today. While some of Bailey's arguments appear to be more of a "straw man" approach than a scholarly debate (particularly at the After Thought Web Site), he encourages the reader to think about the legitimacy of his ideas, the impact of computing upon society, and the future of our current way of thinking.
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